Storm season is coming to the shores of Southern California, and that could make global supply-chain bottlenecks even worse.
Close to 160 vessels are waiting to enter the Long Beach and Los Angeles port complex — some mega-sized container ships carrying as much as half a million tons of everything from consumer goods to factory inputs. The build-up of cargo outside the main U.S. gateway for Chinese exports is contributing to goods shortages and prices hikes ahead of the Christmas shopping season.
But a new worry is bubbling up from the port gridlock: The area’s storm season that’s already underway will bring high winds and choppy seas, potentially leading to accidents among ships jostling for space.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that he expects a normalization of the supply chain snarl that has led to shortages of key production materials and helped push inflation up to a 30-year high, but the timing of the fix remains “highly uncertain.”
Powell made the remarks in a speech (pdf) following the conclusion of the Fed’s two-day policy meeting on Nov. 3, at which the central bank left interest rates unchanged but voted to proceed with a gradual rollback of the central bank’s massive bond-buying program.
“Our tools cannot ease supply constraints,” Powell said, referring to the Fed’s monetary policy arsenal, which was deployed in full force to help lift the economy from the pandemic lows but which has become increasingly …
I read an article written by a trucker in the container shipping industry.
The short answer is every step in the container shipping industry has backwards incentives when it comes to fixing backlogs and delays. I’m not sure why it took them this long to discover it, but when things are delayed they either suffer no penalties, or they get to charge more.
More money paid for shipping will not go towards increasing wages and attracting more workers, nor will it go towards fixing many of the problems in how the yards and warehouses are operated.
AC